


Black Dragon

by Silverskye13



Series: Original Works [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Blood and Injury, Burns, Dreams and Nightmares, Extended Metaphors, Nightmares, dragon - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-03
Updated: 2018-01-03
Packaged: 2019-02-27 17:03:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,051
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13252677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Silverskye13/pseuds/Silverskye13
Summary: A nightmare I had once that I've been meaning to write down for awhile. There's been some news recently that's made it sort of relevant so I decided to finally pen it out.This is the story of the black dragon. It's not a happy story.





	Black Dragon

I had a certain dream a few years ago that has always stuck with me, stubborn and persistent. Like a black dog it follows me, a shadow that comes only to pass again. Sometimes at the forefront of my mind, others a growl at my heels, always present. It’s a dream that wishes it were a story, a story that wishes it were told. And so I think I’ll share it with you now, though I admit I had never intended to write it down. 

It goes something like this:

* * *

I had a dream about a dragon.   
And it was  _terror_  to me.

I knew it was coming long before it appeared, though I saw no smoke on the horizon. I felt it somewhere in my gut, and in the space behind your eyes where your common sense dies at your tear ducts. I felt the beast coming, and I warned everyone.

“The dragon is coming!” I screamed at faces I couldn’t recognize, though in my dream I named them, “Please,  _please_ the dragon is coming!”

And like any story worth telling, no one listened. And so the dragon came, and so the people went. They went like the spray that breaks against a ship’s hull and they splintered into nothing. They went like bloody grapes plucked off a vine and snapped shut between toothy jaws. Some went like slaves, and I was one of them. Fettered and chained and terrified. Every day the dragon sat lord-like on it’s cobblestone bridge -  _why such a bridge in a dream where nothing else existed? -_ and every day it picked a new person to snap. Every day someone died by it’s teeth and it’s breath. Sometimes slowly, picked apart and squirming like an angry child pulling legs off a spider. Other days being disappeared whole, so quick and sudden you could hardly believed they’d stopped existing.

But the dragon didn’t kill  _all_ , no. It was a dragon after all. It was jealous, and it lusted, and it hungered. And I had heard in this dream, as had many of the dream people with me, of the hope that came from appeasing the dragon. Few did it we knew, but  _it happened_. Who else could start the rumors? For certain it wasn’t blind hope that drove us.

In my desperation I tried it. I approached the dragon and I struck a deal to find it what it wanted. I scoured, I scraped, I clawed. I found gold or I stole it, leaving trinkets one by one at great clawed feet. I spoke to strangers it picked for me, and it delighted in forcing me into people who I had the strength for less and less. Dark people, dragon people, people with a mind like  _it_. And people that laughed at me and spat at me and in turn made the dragon laugh, great tendrils of smoke and ash wheezing past it’s teeth. I polished it’s claws, I doled out praises. I prayed to it’s teeth and begged mercy of it’s fire.

Until finally I had run the list dry and I stood before the thing, small and pitiful, and finally seeing it in it’s grandness for the first time. The dragon was a towering beast, lithe like a cat and long as a snake, with a face pointed and sharp as a dagger. It was black, with scales that hardly shone, as if the dragon were made of the ash it wheezed when it spoke. But it’s teeth I remember, so bright and starkly white against the dull blacks of it’s body that even the slightest curl of it’s lips flashed them broad and terrifying.

It watched me for a long while when I finished it’s chores, and in my hope I believed it would set me free. And it did,  _but only just_. As I turned to leave it spat at me, a sticky hot flame that clung to my clothes and I screamed and I staggered. And though I wanted desperately to run I  _couldn’t_. It had seared my leg. With a grin it watched me as I sobbed and I crawled, and finally I hobbled away.

I scrambled and I kept scrambling, a fight of tears and terror and pain. I don’t know how long I went past the cobblestone bridge where it kept it’s prisoners, into a city-scape that made no sense, with buildings that were toppled yet somehow still whole. I ran and I hid, and I knew it was useless.

The dragon was hunting me. I saw it’s shadow in the sky and I could smell the smoke of it’s breath wherever I went. It roared and shook the ground with it’s closeness, it concussed the air with it’s wings. 

And it found me, cowering behind piles of trash in the hopes it wouldn’t be able to smell me out. The care it took in extracting me could almost have been gentle. Curved claws scooped my up as I shook and I sobbed, sharp to tear my apart but now desperately still as though afraid they would break me. But it held me in place nonetheless and watched me as I cried.

And it smiled.

“You knew this was going to happen,” the dragon said, spreading it’s wings wide to block out the sky.

Still too afraid to speak, and wracked with sobs and tears, I could only nod.

“Why did you even bother?” it asked me, smoke hissing from it’s mouth.

For the first time since the dream had begun I found my voice and I begged.

“ _Please_ ,” I told it, “ _Please_ , don’t burn me.”

I was terrified, and through my panic that was all I could think. I didn’t want to be burned alive. I didn’t want my last moments to be wreathed in fire. I thought it would be the most painful way to die, and it  _terrified me_.

The dragon laughed. And it opened it’s maw. And the last thing the dream showed me was fire.

* * *

When I woke up from the dream I cried. I didn’t cry because I was scared, or because of how bitter the dream was. I cried because in that waking instant I knew what the dragon was, and it scared me more than any fire my dreams could make.

**Author's Note:**

> There's a lot I could say about this but I don't really know how to voice it properly, and honestly any of you who've read my darker stuff probably already know what this is about. 
> 
> Anyway, if you guys don't know the things that've gone down in the news recently to make this relevant, I won't tell you about it because it's kinda fucked up. All you really need to know is it's how I feel about depression.
> 
> I have very strong feelings about my mental state and the things that I go through internally. I will openly admit last year was a good(?) year for me as far as this sort of thing goes. I at least seemed to have fewer dark weeks to deal with than the year before. But regardless I have this... weird... sureness in my gut that says it's going to be my depression that kills me someday. Even on good days when I think about it, I feel like it's only a matter of time.
> 
> [this is the space where I wrote a lot of explanation, realized ya'll really don't need to read all of that, and deleted it, and now have no idea how to wrap up this author's notes section].
> 
> Anyway, finally getting this story off my chest I guess. I don't feel any better having finally told it. I feel like I didn't do it justice. I feel like I shouldn't be telling it at all. I feel like there are enough problems in the world without my readers knowing the darkthoughts of the person they followed for fanfiction.
> 
> But I also don't want this story to go forever untold. And now is as good a time as any I guess.
> 
> Anyway.
> 
> Goodnight all. Remember to take your meds if you have them. Drink some water. Eat some good food. Get a decent amount of sleep. And remember the dragon doesn't have to win, even if you feel like that's the only way the dragon will leave. I know there's a way to slay the dragon, even if I haven't figured it out yet.


End file.
